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Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

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Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#51

Post by patio11 »

patio11 wrote: post #33

You say you have been attempting to get a job for the past 3 months. Over the past week, what activities, specifically, have you done to get a job? Have you been to interviews? How many? How did they go? Were there any questions you were unable to answer? Was there any particularly difficult part of the interview? Did you not attend interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you lined up interviews? How ma…

By the way, on the offchance you're not aware of it: the single most compelling things on your resume are both buried behind "more details..."

The following suggests substantial technical competence at multiple levels, which is both above the level which you self-identify as and is not hinted to elsewhere in the resume:

Features of CRM: Shopping Cart, API for Bookscouter etc to pull in quotes, Sort and Filter orders using AngularJS, Sort and Filter Files assigned to Buyers(payroll, etc..), Drag and drop files, and assign files to buyers using inline editing.

Api's used: Amazon Product API for book data, UPS Shipping API for shipping labels.

Cache/Sessions: Redis.

Server Stack: 2 App Servers w/ content duplicated via GlusterFS and served up via nodebalancers. 1 Central Storage Server for Redis, File Uploads, Analytics(Piwik), Mysql(Master). All reads come from a local mysql slave, w/ writes going to the master. Nginx + php5-fpm php5.4 + APC + Varnish.

The following contains specific examples of business value which you've created with your SEO/marketing skills, as opposed to the body of the resume, which says "Managed many wordpress installations, and seo marketing campaigns for multiple sites.":

Achieved 1st rank in google for keyword 'final expense'. Made all technical decisions and handled everything relating to the web properties.

That's an unfortunate way to phrase that accomplishment, since many people do not work in insurance and don't realize that what you really accomplished was:

"Created a system which produced insurance leads, adding hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per $TIME_INTERVAL. The system operated at zero marginal cost per acquisition, a substantial improvement over the industry standard of spending 30% of gross revenue on acquisition."

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#52

Post by jcmurrayii »

jcmurrayii wrote: post #49

Red flag for me. You have been doing this for a decade...and still consider yourself junior?

I realized I should have expounded a bit to actually make why this is a red flag a little more apparent.

A 'normal' year of work nets you 2080 hours of work. Thats 52 40 hours weeks.

Mastery of a given topic matter is considered to be around 10,000 hours of work. At that rate, if you have worked a 40 hour job doing something, for 5 years, you should have mastered most of the skills. When I see 'junior' developer, I am used to it being a developer with less than 3 years of experience. I hire people like this, but only for specific needs. My expectations are inline with their experience, and I look at their past work history to get an idea of what level I should expect them to perform at.

Not all people doing technical hiring are that fair minded though. There are many that will see junior, and will move on, because they need someone with more team skills, or skills in architecture, large application development, etc, that they do not expect to see from 'junior' developers.

If someone tells me they have been working on web development related tasks for ten years, but consider themselves junior, then I worry that they have not applied themselves, or stuck to the same job long enough to actually improve their skills, etc. THESE worries...are why I wouldn't hire them. I would have concerns around their ability to grow and learn within my organization, and whether or not the time and money I would pour into their training would pay off in the future with a well skilled and well rounded member on my team, rather than another trip to the well of talent for another junior developer to try to help 'level up' to a different role.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#53

Post by TallGuyShort »

mrbill wrote: post #11

Reword your resume (especially this part: "I've Spent a good decade just doing mostly freelance work, and installing apps") - otherwise it sounds like you're really good at installing/configuring stuff other people have written. Also remove the $70K Salary Requirement.

On your LinkedIn profile you have written the salary requirement as "65,0000" (with four zeros). As others have recommended, I highly recommend having some people proof-read your resume / profiles, and following all the advice you've received here.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#54

Post by greenyoda »

afarrell wrote: post #9

You should probably say where you live if you are looking for a job. Also, if they said they would give you a particular portion of some pile of money as compensation, you might consider suing them for wage theft. Also, why are you "evil"?

You can only sue for wage theft if you're an employee. He said he "got accepted into a startup accelerator", so that seems to suggest some kind of co-founder relationship. He might be able to sue for breach of contract, but if it was just a verbal agreement it would be hard to prove there was a contract. Since he doesn't have any money, he'd have to find a lawyer who thinks the case is good enough to take on contingency.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#55

Post by TallGuyShort »

justplay wrote: post #40
[deleted] wrote: post #34

[deleted]

> $70k is a lot for a junior developer Really? i guess that is an average salary.

It depends a lot on location. He's currently in Utah. $70k there is a relatively generous salary for a junior developer.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#56

Post by sergiotapia »

sdegutis wrote: post #20
afarrell wrote: post #9

You should probably say where you live if you are looking for a job. Also, if they said they would give you a particular portion of some pile of money as compensation, you might consider suing them for wage theft. Also, why are you "evil"?

Being an "evil coder" is just an expression that means they do pretty crazy things in their code that others might find questionable, but presumably having the skill to pull it off without causing bugs.

Doesn't invoke that meaning to me at all. Sounds really off.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#58

Post by afarrell »

sdegutis wrote: post #20
afarrell wrote: post #9

You should probably say where you live if you are looking for a job. Also, if they said they would give you a particular portion of some pile of money as compensation, you might consider suing them for wage theft. Also, why are you "evil"?

Being an "evil coder" is just an expression that means they do pretty crazy things in their code that others might find questionable, but presumably having the skill to pull it off without causing bugs.

Huh. I've never heard that term before. Now that I know the definition...I'm skeptical I would want to read that person's code.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#59

Post by brianpgordon »

kevinskii wrote: post #38
patio11 wrote: post #33

You say you have been attempting to get a job for the past 3 months. Over the past week, what activities, specifically, have you done to get a job? Have you been to interviews? How many? How did they go? Were there any questions you were unable to answer? Was there any particularly difficult part of the interview? Did you not attend interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you lined up interviews? How ma…

> In fact, if you could take your resume off the Internet, that would probably be in your favor. Please seriously consider taking down your personal website as well. In five minutes of glancing through your blog entries I found too many glaring "do not hire" flags to mention here. You seem like a decent sort of person, and I mean this with all due respect. Good luck in your search.

48 pages of thinly-veiled ads and MLM scams! I did some Google searches and I was amazed to find that it seems to be entirely original content. I don't know how that can be profitable.

Re: Ask HN: About to be homeless, any ideas for a junior dev?

#60

Post by gremlinsinc »

patio11 wrote: post #33

You say you have been attempting to get a job for the past 3 months. Over the past week, what activities, specifically, have you done to get a job? Have you been to interviews? How many? How did they go? Were there any questions you were unable to answer? Was there any particularly difficult part of the interview? Did you not attend interviews in the last week? In the alternative, have you lined up interviews? How ma…

The past month I've been working as CTO in a Startup Accelerator, my team had promised me 2k per month to live on during this time, this week they backed out of that agreement and instead are wanting 2k for the entire 3 months. I've been coding 70 hours per week on this project.

Before we were sure we were even going to be accepted to BoomStartup, I had been going to about 10 interviews per week, I'm on the jr side my strong point is Laravel, but I was willing to interview/learn more Rails. I spent over 1000 just in gas travelling between Salt Lake, Sandy, and PRovo Utah for job interviews in the month of April alone. I've also been connecting with individuals at local Meetups, and online via User Groups I belong to in the area. Thanks for the advice, I'll work on my resume, and soft skills.

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